Paul Mount Brass Sculptures

The sculptor Paul Mount exploited the sensual qualities of hard metals, particularly cast iron, bronze and stainless steel, which he used freely to express a vision that ranged from the architectural to the figurative. In common with many distinguished sculptors, Mount began as a painter and continued to make paintings as a vital accompaniment to his three-dimensional work.

Mount's abstracted sculptures, however, never originated from graphic designs or other cerebral plans, but rather evolved directly from scale models made in makeshift and versatile materials like card, wax and polystyrene. Although the final sculptures have the durable presence of cast or constructed metal, the rhythmic interplay between solid form and open void were created by free manipulation of easily constructed components.

Born in Devon and living in St Just, Cornwall from the early 1960s, Mount worked as an essentially abstract sculptor in an area celebrated by artists like the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. He had no direct professional contact with Hepworth, though he became, along with her former assistant Denis Mitchell, the most prominent sculptor in the region after her death in 1975.

Mount was born in 1922 in Newton Abbot. Educated at the local grammar school, he began art studies at Paignton School of Art and later attended the Royal College of Art in London. During the Second World War, Mount drove for the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France. A spell teaching at Winchester School of Art after the war led to seven years in West Africa, where he worked as a design consultant on architectural projects in Nigeria.